A-Z of Soft Skills: L is for Learning

 I grew up in a devout Sikh household and from the time I was old enough to repeat words, I was taught that the definition of a Sikh was "one who learns." 

That, my grandmother always said, was to be our life ideal, our ultimate aspiration. As human beings, that was our fundamental duty--to keep on learning.

When you stopped learning and questioning and thinking and improving and becoming, you ceased being a Sikh.

That's a great ideal to have, whether or not you are a follower of Sikhism.

Learning helps us improve on who we are now. Continuous learning is continuous improvement, a neverending cycle of reinvention and upgrading that keeps transforming us. Thus, we evolve.

The ability to learn is:

• to find and get information
• to assimilate it and incorporate it within ourselves 
• to create knowledge that we can then use to live our life more efficiently, effectively and with more enjoyment and fulfillment

Learning helps us problem-solve and make decisions that are educated and pertinent. However, education and learning are not necessarily or always the same thing:

“Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do for yourself”

Education is formal, driven by external forces, tied to a curriculum and a generalist agenda (a certificate, a diploma, an undergraduate or post-graduate degree) and it is "taught" by experts. It is thus given to you within the ambit of some clear rules of engagement and tested against a standardised syllabus within a specific scope of time and with expected "credit"or accreditation.

Learning is often informal and internally driven to satisfy a curiosity or a desire to know something. It is an active and subjective process in which I take control of the knowledge gathering process. I can learn anything, anywhere, from anyone at anytime and by any means or methods I choose.

In fact, we human beings are natural, curious, exploratory, intrinsically motivated, constructive learners and a large chunk of our learning happens outside of our formal education, from life and work and all the things we see and experience.

Even more fundamentally, learning is a survival skill. It helps us change and adapt according to the constantly changing world around us. It helps us gain control of our ever-shifting environment and circumstances. It helps us upgrade and evolve and prevents us from becoming dated and thus obsolete!